Simon & Tom Bloor: Planning For Play

For the next edition of our Platform residency programme, artists Simon & Tom Bloor will produce a series of new sculptures based on their research into children’s play-spaces and the postwar urban landscape. Over the course of four weeks they will transform Site Gallery into an open studio, exhibition space and play area.

The artists will publicly and openly generate designs for new play-sculptures in one of our gallery spaces. Visitors are invited to watch them work-up ideas and wall drawings, as well as experiment with materials they’ve never used before or materials they are utilising in a new way. The accompanying gallery will be a dedicated exhibition and playspace with some of the elements created by the artists being playable.

The designs produced during Planning for Play are inspired by the work of a number key postwar architects who helped legitimise the involvement of architects in play. This includes Dutch designer Aldo van Eyck’s turning bars and climbing igloos, American architect Richard Dattner’s playcubes and modular units, and the work of Lady Allen Hurtwood, whose 1968 book, Planning for Play, is referenced in the project’s title. Simon & Tom Bloor aim to explore art making as a playful process and play as a creative process.